Tamil Wisdom

There are very few historical records in the Tamil language. Fables and moral sayings in verse having a strong hold on the memory have been preserved through the revolutions of four thousand years while history has perished. Perhaps if we had the songs and sayings of our ancestors of four thousand years ago they would be equally interesting. The acquisition of the language in which the remains of Tamil wisdom are preserved is no easy task. Some of the papers following have already seen the light; but the work that contained them had scarcely begun to circulate when the copies in stock perished in a fire. The translations of the Cural andMariyāthay-Rāman in this volume are now published for the first time. The concluding paper is a rendering of a prose composition in the spoken language. The versions of the CuralMuthuray and Agaval are from writings in the poetic dialect and form in which all the most ancient Tamil books extant on whatever subject are composed.Words and idioms occur in Tamil which remind the student of parallels in Hebrew.